New sociotechnical insights in interaction design

New challenges are facing interaction design. On one hand because of advances in technology – pervasive, ubiquitous, multimodal and adaptive computing – are changing the nature of interaction. On the other, web 2.0, massive multiplayer games and collaboration software extends the boundaries of HCI to deal with interaction in settings of remote communication and collaboration. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for HCI practitioners and researchers interested in knowledge from the social sciences to discuss how sociotechnical insights can be used to inform interaction design, and more generally how social science methods and theories can help to enrich the conceptual framework of systems development and participatory design. Position papers submissions are invited to address key aspects of current research and practical case studies

Co-evolution of End-User Developers and Systems in Multi-tiered Proxy Design Problems

This paper aims at analyzing the category of multi-tiered proxy design problems, where end-user developers do not necessarily coincide with the actual end users of the system, but can be considered as end users’ proxies. This situation can be found in a variety of application domains, from home automation, where electricians defining home automation systems for energy saving are different from house occupants, to e-government, where administrative employees creating e-government services are different from citizens using those services. The analysis leads to the definition of a new interaction and co-evolution model, called ICE2, which, on the basis of the model discussed in a previous work, considers not only the case of end users that directly make their system evolve by means of end-user development activities, but also the case where a proxy figure is present, namely an expert in the application domain that creates and modifies software artifacts for others (the actual end users). Finally, a design approach is proposed, which aims at generalizing the solutions suggested in different application domains, and at sustaining the interaction and co-evolution processes that involve end users, end-user developers, and systems